@Augustusman said:
@AAHale said:
@Augustusman said:
@Sylvain8992 said:
I prefer steam too, forced to buy on windows store is not really a good idea I find
No good for you, good for them, but what will be happen if they fail with this?
It isn’t good for them at all; they’ve gone out of their way to narrow their potential customer base as much as they possibly can. The only way they’d be able to top this would be to make future AoE games invite-only.
Nobody is force to you to buy something.
They have a store to maintain, you know?
Why can’t they have the game on both, as well as other platforms? Many games do this, including the HD remakes of AoE II and AoM. It’s hardly revolutionary.
It’s funny you say no one is forcing me to buy it, but if anyone wants to play it then they are being forced to buy it from the Windows store, and being forced off of Steam (which most/all of their other games and mods are on).
I understand the arguments about broadening the marketplace and providing an alternative to Steam; that makes sense and there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but to insist that everyone require a certain version of a certain OS and buy the game from a certain online store (that is poorly reviewed and - for PC products - rarely used) is just ridiculous, and I find it bizarre that people choose to defend this policy.
If the game were available on Steam, GoG and elsewhere as well as on the Windows store then this argument would never have come about; no one would have a problem, and people would laud the variety of platforms being supported. To limit the game so narrowly in the way MS have chosen to do, however, is not only a bad idea – it’s so obviously a really bad idea, and it’s going to cost them no end of sales and thus revenue. As a follow-on from that, MS will consider the franchise a poor investment and cease to support it in the future. You can see this kind of thing coming a mile off.
Literally no one wins from this decision; MS will be out of pocket because the money they save by avoiding Valve’s 30% transaction tax will obviously never be anywhere near recuperated from additional sales on the Windows store; the customer will suffer by being arbitrarily forced into using an operating system and market place they may otherwise not wish to; the franchise will suffer because its extremely limited sales potential (and please don’t argue this point as it’s self-evident; specific OS version + specific store required) will reflect not that there is no adequate demand for the game, but that there is no adequate supply of the game.
If MS believes that millions of casual gamers are going to upgrade their OS simply in order to play an AoE game then they’re sadly mistaken, and other users have posted stats actually showing a recent fall in Windows 10 usage in favour of older versions.
This decision is inexcusable, and it will either be reverted or MS will simply have to abandon any hopes of challenging other mainstream video games on the basis that, in terms of player numbers/product availability, future AoE games will never be on a level playing field with everything else. It’s akin to a Linux-only version of Witcher III trying to challenge Skyrim for popularity.
